Amazon belches fragrant clouds of AWS Node.js for JavaScripters

Node.JS is claiming another web giant, with official backing coming from Amazon’s cloud.

The cloud giant’s released the AWS SDK for Node.js, a programming environment for building JavaScript apps on its Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Amazon claimed developers can get started “in minutes” building JavaScript apps for Amazon Web Services including DynamoDB, Simple Storage Service (S3) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Workflow Service (SWF).

AWS SDK for Node.js a work in progress with Amazon having posted the code to github, and the cloud provider ready for feedback.

Node.js provides a programming and runtime framework for the browser-based JavaScript on servers.

The idea is Node.js lets JavaScript apps scale to run on servers with multi cores and in distributed data centers with lots of users and call requests without slowing or locking up. Node.JS uses event loops to run processes instead of threaded model. It also uses the fast V8 JavaScript engine from Google.

The SDK should, in theory, mean Amazon is making Node.js-based JavaScript run better on its massively distributed servers, thereby helping JavaScript apps on its service. You can already run Node.JS on Amazon's own metal with some tuning and via Heroku, the application deployment platform that runs on top of Amazon and is owned by Salesforce.com.

Node.js is already used by eBay and Yahoo among others; last year Microsoft came around to Node.js, starting work to make Node.js a native port on Windows. The idea was for an official binary node.exe to run on Windows Server and Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, which Redmond is trying to fluff up against Amazon.

Microsoft today supports Node.js on Azure with an SDK for Node.js 0.6.7 – the latest current release is version 0.8.15. ®